THE EVE CONTROVERSY (evolution of human females’ mitochondria)

by; Charles Weber, MS, isoptera at att.net

The paleoanthropologists who attempt to maintain that the people of the whole human race could not have had their mitochondria derived from a single woman 200,000 years ago [Thorne 1992] or 146,000 years ago [Horai, et al 1995] or possibly 400,000 years ago (assuming some paternal input) are not considering one possible circumstance. If a woman had a mutation among her mitochondria that gave her a significant advantage, that mitochondria would spread throughout her village. Furthermore, that mitochondria would eventually take over any surrounding village which acquired an "Eve" fertile woman. The gene could even conceivably have arrived originally from another primate that was able to have viable progeny with the human branch.

If a gene arose, for instance, which enabled an "Eve" to average 10 babies in an average lifetime while all other non "eves" were averaging 9, that gene and its mitochondria associates would relentlessly supplant all others. The process would be slow and statistically uncertain at first, because an accident could remove a single individual or family. However, as the percentage of "eves" built up in the village, the continuance would become more certain and the speed of the takeover would increase. In a village maintained at 100 women, when the mathematically calculated number of "eves" passed 99 statistically there would be no "non eves", and the whole village would seem to be derived from a single couple from its mitochondria. In small populations, mitochondrial genes will either become 100% fixed or extinct. The smaller the population, the faster the result [Li].

The period when the new gene predominated in all the mitochondria of the cells would not be long either. It is possible for the percentage of the mitochondria in the cells to vary from 6% to 69% from the lung as opposed to the heart in the same individual, possibly because the mitochondria are taken preferentially [Meirelles], so a 100% takeover is theoretically possible in a couple of generations [Blok][Jenuth 1996, 1997]. There is even evidence that stem cells can insert mitochondria into other cells.

Even if a single woman was captured or seduced by a Neanderthal man in a local population of 10,000 Neanderthals, eventually "eve's" mitochondria would virtually exclude all others if it were not accidentally eliminated early on and much, much before 200,000 years. Even something as trivial as a one percent improvement in something like energy output would overwhelm the other mitochondria hosts well before such a time. Her nuclear genes, on the other hand, would likely be virtually undetectable only a few dozen generations later, and the Neanderthals would be virtually indistinguishable from their ancestors anatomically. The "Eve" gene would follow approximately the mathematical rules which bacterial genes are subject to (indeed mitochondria probably arose from a symbiosis of an ancient bacteria with eukaryote cells that permitted enormous complexity in the rest of the genome [Lane] )), not rules for nuclear genes, since mitochondria genes do not normally recombine (although they may do so occasionally [Wallis] ). This approximate bacterial rule would be especially close when all the mitochondria in an individual acquired the same advantageous gene. Bacteria have often been seen to have even trivially advantageous traits or deletions sweep through a population in a rather small number of generations.

Begun proposes that Dryopithecus ape from Europe is the ancestor of the human line (hominin) [Begun]. I think that it is highly probable that all the hominids that arose after the Miocene could hybridize.

As for humans supplanting all humanoid primates, take note that they have not even supplanted non-humanoid chimpanzees or gorillas even today. Two hundred thousand years ago humans had no obvious technological advantage over their contemporaries, surely none, at least, which could not have been easily adopted by their contemporaries, especially those that hybridized.

Language diversity also denies evolution in only 200,000 years. Africa alone has 2000 language groups that represent nearly one third of the world’s languages [Tishkoff]. There is no chance at all that that many different languages could appear from a single couple in only 200,000 years.